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The colonel and his people were the first to arrive, he and his wife being so effusively grateful that they made me very uncomfortable indeed; Lilian met me with downcast eyes and the faintest possible blush, but she said nothing just then. Five minutes afterward, when she and I were alone together in the conservatory, where I had brought her on pretence of showing a new begonia, she laid her hand on my sleeve and whispered, almost shyly, “Mr. Weatherhead–Algernon! Can you ever forgive me for being so cruel and unjust to you?” And I replied that, upon the whole, I could.

We were not in the conservatory long, but before we left it beautiful Lilian Roseblade had consented to make my life happy. When we reentered the drawing-room we found Frank Travers, who had been told the story of the recovery; and I observed his jaw fall as he glanced at our faces, and noted the triumphant smile which I have no doubt mine wore, and the tender, dreamy look in Lilian’s soft eyes. Poor Travers! I was sorry for him, although I was not fond of him. Travers was a good type of rising young common-law barrister, tall, not bad-looking, with keen dark eyes, black whiskers, and the mobile forensic mouth which can express every shade of feeling, from deferential assent to cynical incredulity; possessed, too, of an endless flow of conversation that was decidedly agreeable, if a trifling too laboriously so, he had been a dangerous rival. But all that was over now; he saw it himself at once, and during dinner sank into dismal silence, gazing pathetically at Lilian, and sighing almost obtrusively between the courses. His stream of small talk seemed to have been cut off at the main.

“You’ve done a kind thing, Weatherhead,” said the colonel. “I can’t tell you all that dog is to me, and how I missed the poor beast. I’d quite given up all hope of ever seeing him again, and all the time there was Weatherhead, Mr. Travers, quietly searching all London till he found him! I sha’n’t forget it. It shows a really kind feeling.”

I saw by Travers’s face that he was telling himself he would have found fifty Bingos in half the time–if he had only thought of it; he smiled a melancholy assent to all the colonel said, and then began to study me with an obviously depreciatory air.

“You can’t think,” I heard Mrs. Currie telling my mother, “how really touching it was to see poor Bingo’s emotion at seeing all the old familiar objects again! He went up and sniffed at them all in turn, quite plainly recognising everything. And he was quite put out to find that we had moved his favourite ottoman out of the drawing-room. But he is so penitent too, and so ashamed of having run away; he kept under a chair in the hall all the morning; he wouldn’t come in here, either, so we had to leave him in your garden.”

“He’s been sadly out of spirits all day,” said Lilian; “he hasn’t bitten one of the tradespeople.”

“Oh, he’s all right, the rascal!” said the colonel, cheerily. “He’ll be after the cats again as well as ever in a day or two.”

“Ah, those cats!” said my poor innocent mother. “Algy, you haven’t tried the air-gun on them again lately, have you? They’re worse than ever.”

I troubled the colonel to pass the claret. Travers laughed for the first time. “That’s a good idea,” he said, in that carrying “bar-mess” voice of his; “an air-gun for cats, ha, ha! Make good bags, eh, Weatherhead?” I said that I did, very good bags, and felt I was getting painfully red in the face.

“Oh, Algy is an excellent shot–quite a sportsman,” said my mother. “I remember, oh, long ago, when we lived at Hammersmith, he had a pistol, and he used to strew crumbs in the garden for the sparrows, and shoot at them out of the pantry window; he frequently hit one.”